I'm curious what you all think. The shock has worn off enough to discuss things in a more political way - but the thread in the Canada section certainly isn't an appropriate place.

I haven't yet watched the full remarks from Harper, Trudeau, and the NDP guy - so I don't trust the one-line summaries from the media. But it appears Harper is "fight terror", Trudeau is perfect platitudes, and the other guy is the most realistic, with the right platitudes but without the Bush-style "fucking for virginity" BS.

Anyone know if that's accurate?

So, what's next? What happens?

If the federation takes another lurch to the right, I might lose my mind. Can you imagine something like the Patriot Act here? We're not that afraid of reality or gullible, I think, so I hope it won't be so bad... but governments always try to weasel shit by in situations like this.

MonkeyRonin or MolsonExport posted a link to a story about Harper saying we need better laws for police surveillance. That's fine, if that's all it is. But... I wouldn't be surprised if they take the chance to erode net neutrality or whatever else. I wouldn't trust this government for a second.

What do you lot think?

__________________Note to self: "The plural of anecdote is not evidence."

I'm curious what you all think. The shock has worn off enough to discuss things in a more political way - but the thread in the Canada section certainly isn't an appropriate place.

I haven't yet watched the full remarks from Harper, Trudeau, and the NDP guy - so I don't trust the one-line summaries from the media. But it appears Harper is "fight terror", Trudeau is perfect platitudes, and the other guy is the most realistic, with the right platitudes but without the Bush-style "fucking for virginity" BS.

Anyone know if that's accurate?

So, what's next? What happens?

If the federation takes another lurch to the right, I might lose my mind. Can you imagine something like the Patriot Act here? We're not that afraid of reality or gullible, I think, so I hope it won't be so bad... but governments always try to weasel shit by in situations like this.

MonkeyRonin or MolsonExport posted a link to a story about Harper saying we need better laws for police surveillance. That's fine, if that's all it is. But... I wouldn't be surprised if they take the chance to erode net neutrality or whatever else. I wouldn't trust this government for a second.

What do you lot think?

Firstly, there should be no new legislation. The changes the Harper government has announced were planned before this week. They include allowing CSIS to spy on Canadian citizens who are outside of Canada, including Canadians resident in another country, allowing CSIS to conceal the identities of its sources from Canadian courts, and making it easier to detain people for extended periods of time without charge. The changes are bad for our privacy and our criminal justice system and should be resisted.

Secondly, there should be no visible changes in security. Better training on situational awareness for peace officers, security guards, and at-risk workers could be helpful, but installing metal detectors or increasing the number of armed guards in public buildings will NOT deter an attack by a lone nutter. An increase in visible security in one location would simply cause a would-be attacker to change his target. Instead of attacking people in a government building, for example, a lone shooter could target people at a bus stop or cafe used by government staffers. There will always be somewhere crowded that can't be protected.

Thirdly, it needs to be more difficult to obtain firearms and ammunition. Thanks to the abolition of the long gun registry, we'll never know where Zehaf-Bibeau's gun came from, but we do know he was neither eligible for nor carrying a possession and acquisition license (PAL). It's impossible to buy ammunition legally without a PAL, so the availability of ammunition to people without one is a failure of law enforcement. Better efforts need to be made to locate ammunition being smuggled into Canada, monitor the loss of legal ammunition from the supply chain, and identify and charge people who are selling or distributing ammunition illegally. I know that reviving the long gun registry is a political impossibility, but without it there's no way track the circumstances in which law-abiding gun owners are parted from their firearms. That makes enforcing laws related to the possession of long guns extremely difficult.

Finally, I'll link to an article about the police use of firearms. (Please ignore the silly bit at the end about uniforms.) Shooting someone who's brandishing a knife at a safe distance, as happened in Quebec, is NOT acceptable police work. Unarmed policing with access to armed backup works, and it helps keep both officers and suspects alive. The RCMP has a terrible history of sending officers with sidearms into harm's way alone or in small groups, putting the officers at risk even if there is no immediate danger to the public. The Mayerthorpe tragedy is one example of this, and the Moncton shooter exploited the MO to kill Mounties one at a time. We should think long and hard about the circumstances where peace officers are issued firearms, and ensure they have adequate training in the use of less lethal weapons such as batons and cs spray. Officers guarding specific people and places, executing search warrants, or looking for a known violent offender should probably carry sidearms, for example, but there's no reason a shotgun in the trunk shouldn't be adequate for an officer on traffic duty.

Now that the dust is settling and the details are starting to emerge from both of this past weeks incidents, a common thread is mental health issues amongst both radicalized men. A response that actually addresses how we help individuals like that instead of allowing them to seek out radical ideologies to try to latch onto, would be immensely appropriate in my mind. I doubt it will happen though.

If we lived in a genuinely intelligent world. Iraq would of been left alone a dozen years ago.

And Syria resistances fighters would of been decimated 10 seconds after this nonsense started.

Like christ terrorism doesn't really work if people ignore it.

You over react and they win, as cliched as that is there is truth in it.

Making this a global war is antagonizing.

Treating these groups no different from neo-nazi skin heads-, tamil-italian-russian gangster wannabes, etc is all I ask.

That being said, alot of these muslim groups should start being charged with hate crimes, and other laws directed at organized crime.

What instead is gonna happen is antagonizing an irrelevant debate of islam vs west, loose muslim support in stomping out these gansta thugs wannabe's, send more of our soldiers to die in the middle east, and further antagonize asia.